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Jan. 25, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
45:17
Mob Psychology with Dr Mattias Desmet

Mass formation also known as mob psychology or crowd psychology, is the study of how individual behavior is influenced by large group of people. RFK Jr discusses mass formation in this episode with Dr. Mattias Desmet, author of "The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

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My guest today is Professor Matthias Desmond of Ghent University, who is one of the leading expert voices on a specific topic that has captured the world's imagination in the last couple of weeks.
And in addition to being a lecturing professor in clinical psychology at Ghent University, he holds master's degrees in statistics.
And I know that you're very, very busy, Professor Desmond, these days.
You and I were on a group conference call with a large group of really extraordinary physicians.
About three or four weeks ago, and you and I agreed to meet and have this conversation because it's an issue.
The capacities and the algorithms for controlling populations is something that, and particularly the use of fear, That has interested me for a long time.
And I'll talk a little bit about, you know, why my interest was first sparked on this many, many years ago.
But you did a podcast.
We had arranged to do a podcast.
And in the interim, you did a podcast with Robert Malone that I think woke a lot of the world up to the dangerous place that we are now.
And a really brilliant kind of A distillation of how we ended up here.
But let me just start as a...
And the subject is mass formation psychology.
How governments and totalitarian forces use fear and other elements.
Loneliness, isolation...
Demoralization of populations to assert control over populations and to persuade, essentially to hypnotize large groups of people to act against their own interests.
And, you know, you've talked about how that kind of compliance is engineered.
And what you're saying is not new.
These are issues that have been documented for 150 years.
The control of populations through the use of these devices.
But let's talk about what is mass formation psychology or mass formation hypnosis.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Well, I think to start with, I never use the term mass formation psychosis.
I always prefer to talk about just mass formation because I think when you add the term psychosis, it might be from an ethical, a pragmatic and also a An intellectual point of view, a little bit problematic, I believe.
Just to correct you, I used the word hypnosis, not psychosis.
My voice is very bad.
Well, it's mind-boggling and baffling how it is possible that so many people start to think in such an authoritarian way.
And indeed, I think it can be Pretty well explained by this concept of mass formation.
You know, the first important question is, I think, whether such a process of mass formation emerges in a spontaneous way or whether it is provoked artificially.
And it can be a combination of the two.
It can be both, to a certain extent, emerge spontaneously in a society or...
It can be artificially provoked by certain leaders who want to use this dynamic of mass formation to be in control.
You know, maybe it's good to tell a little bit how I came to study the psychology of this crisis.
Because for me, I took a skeptical stance from the beginning of the crisis.
I am a professor in clinical psychology, as you said, but I also have a master in statistics.
I don't call myself a statistician because for me, a statistician is someone who is involved in statistics day in, day out.
And for me, this is no longer the case now.
In the first four or five years of my career, I was involved in statistics, but later on, that wasn't the case anymore.
But still, in the beginning of the crisis, I studied the figures and the graphs and the statistics and the mathematical models a little bit, and very soon I became convinced that the dangerousness of the virus was highly overrated, was dramatically overrated.
And I noticed this at all levels, at the levels of the mathematical models, at the levels of the counting of the most elementary variables, such as the number of contaminations, the number of hospitalizations, the number of Victims claimed by the virus.
I noticed time and time again that in one way or another, both the experts and the population, or a major part of the population, in one way or another, tended to overrate the dangerousness of the virus.
And in one way or another, I also noticed something else, namely that not only was the dangerousness of the virus overrated, it also seemed that the population and the experts were blind for a substantial part of reality and a crucial part of reality, namely the collateral damage caused by the measures.
For instance, the United Nations...
By the lockdowns.
It seemed evident to a lot of people, and I talked a lot about this at the beginning, that the lockdowns were highly likely to kill more people than the virus, even if you did nothing.
And WHO data and all kinds of economic data supported that supposition, and yet it was being completely ignored by the policymakers.
Yes, absolutely.
And the strange thing was that many institutions and also many scientists tried to bring this to the attention of the population.
So, for instance, someone at the UN warned us that more children might be dying from starvation in developing countries as a consequence of the lockdowns.
Than the number of victims the virus could claim, even if no measures were taken at all.
And there were numerous other scientists who just made this analysis and showed that actually much more people, many more people would probably die from the measures than there could be saved, even if the virus could kill people, even if no measures were taken at all.
So in a strange way, people seemed incapable to just Do a proper cost benefit analysis.
It never happened.
And we've never seen something like that in the media, for instance.
Sometimes the collateral damage was mentioned a little bit, but it was almost never Represented in numbers and graphs.
And that's what makes the difference.
Because just mentioning the collateral damage does not have a huge psychological impact.
But if you represent something in numbers, people will fall prey to the illusion that the numbers represent the facts.
And if you only represent the number of victims claimed by the virus in numbers and in figures, and you don't do the same for the number of victims claimed by the measures, then people will In the mind of the population, only the victims claimed by the virus will really exist and will really have an emotional and cognitive impact.
So, that were two things for me that were very striking, that in one way or another, on the one hand, there was a constant overrating of the dangerlessness of the virus and the constant neglect.
Or ignoring of the collateral damage claimed by the corona measures.
And I continue to study the...
In the beginning of the crisis, I published a paper, an opinion paper here in Belgium.
The fear of the virus is more dangerous than the virus itself.
And then in the next few months, the beginning of 2020, I continue to study the statistics and by the end of May 2020, I felt that for me it was proven beyond doubt that indeed the world was going through a very strange psychological process.
And a few months later, it took me a few months before I was really able to pinpoint that this process was a process of large scale mass formation.
And When I look back, it seems very strange to me that it took me so long because I had been lecturing about this process for several years before at Ghent University.
I then wrote a second opinion paper on this process of mass formation in which I tried to explain in an as accessible way as possible what Happened at the psychological level in our society during the corona crisis.
Yeah.
You know, let's talk about what are the elements that you need to provoke mass formation.
Yes.
Well...
Mass formation has existed as long as humankind exists, as mankind exists.
But the strange thing is that throughout the last three or four centuries, mass formation became increasingly strong, and it lasted longer, and it became larger.
Much more people were involved in it.
And it's clear that For a large-scale mass formation to emerge, or if someone would want to succeed in provoking a large-scale mass formation, the population has to be in a very specific condition, in a very specific state.
More in particular, actually, four specific conditions have to be met.
And the first and most important one, definitely the crucial one, is that many people have to feel socially isolated.
Hannah Arendt calls that socially atomized.
And if you look, the years before the corona crisis, that was definitely the case.
For instance, the US Surgeon General in the United States warned us that there was a loneliness epidemic going on in the States.
And then in the UK, Theresa May appointed a Minister of Loneliness because she acknowledged that also there the problem of loneliness was huge.
And it's also very nice to see that The number of people feeling lonely is almost perfectly correlated with the level of the use of technology in a country and of the industrialization.
And that probably explains why throughout the last centuries, The populations progressively became more susceptible and more vulnerable for mass formation because more and more people, more and more countries became industrialized and first radio and television was more and more used and then also technological devices such as the internet, mobile phones and so on.
But so that's the most crucial condition.
And then the second condition is there has to be a lot of people who experience a lack of meaning making in life.
And that's actually a consequence of the first condition.
If people feel socially isolated, they readily will feel also a lack of meaning-making, just because human beings are social beings.
And if you look at, for instance, the Gallup world poll, I believe, who asked people whether they considered their job to be meaningful, then only 13% answered yes.
And 60%, 60%, Answered in a convinced way, no, not at all.
I believe that my job makes no sense at all.
And that, in its turn, these first two conditions, the lack of meaning-making, the lack of a social bond, the lack of meaning-making, lead to this third and extremely important condition, that they should be High levels of free-floating anxiety in the population.
Free-floating anxiety, that means anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation.
Concretely speaking, that people feel anxious without knowing what they feel anxious for.
So if you contrast, in most cases, if someone feels anxious, he knows why he's anxious.
For instance, for a dangerous dog or for something else.
But sometimes, if people feel socially isolated, and they feel a lack of meaning-making, they will typically experience a type of anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation, that is freely floating.
And that, in its turn, leads to...
And you can also illustrate that also this was really the case in the last...
Years before the corona crisis, one out of five worldwide suffered from an anxiety disorder.
And the use of antidepressants and anxiolytica and all kinds of pharmaceuticals was huge.
In a country such as Belgium, 300 million doses of antidepressants were used each year in a population of 11 million.
So that shows the extent of the problem, I believe.
And then if you see these first three conditions, the lack of social bond, lack of meaning-making, free-flowing anxiety, those lead to the fourth condition, which is also extremely important.
High levels of free-floating frustration and aggression.
People, because of the psychological discontent and the psychological suffering, people start to feel frustrated and aggressive without knowing why, without knowing who to blame for it.
And if these four conditions are met in a society, then something very specific can happen.
If under these conditions a narrative is distributed through the mass media indicating an object of anxiety, And at the same time, providing a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, then all this free-floating anxiety, this third condition, the free-floating anxiety, might connect to the object of anxiety.
And people might be willing to participate in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.
For instance, lockdowns, face masking, mask wearing, and so on.
And that gives a certain psychological advantage.
It makes that people Free-floating anxiety is extremely hard to control mentally, and it threatens to turn into panic.
But if you can couple the anxiety, if you can connect it to a mental representation, and someone delivers a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety, then you experience much more mental control, and the anxiety decreases.
Let me restate this with You have a society that's fragmented, that's atomized, that has, whether it's a widespread lack of meaning or mission,
and somebody appears, first of all with a scapegoat, with all of this free-floating anxiety, somebody appears and says, here is the reason that you're feeling anxious.
And I have a solution.
And then you get a coalescing of willing people who are willing to bond together to throw their lots in and become part of this team effort.
And we saw this, of course, in 1917 in the Soviet Union when Russia fell apart.
And we saw it again during the fascist era in Italy and Germany, where there was a complete malaise in those societies.
And you had somebody come along with a mission that allowed everybody to coalesce in one great effort with its own ideology, with unit cohesion, with And of course, part of it is having a scapegoat as well.
Somebody that you can point to and say, they're not playing along with our side.
And how do we deal with that?
Absolutely.
Form a crowd or a mass, you need a scapegoat, always.
Because the fourth condition, all this free-floating frustration and aggression, is solved in this way.
The masses are allowed to direct all their aggression and frustration to this scapegoat.
And the scapegoat is always the person or is always the part of the population that does not want or cannot participate in the mass formation for certain reasons.
Yes, absolutely.
And then, indeed, what happens, and you described this already, you referred to that, what happens once all these people participate in the same heroic struggle with the object of anxiety, That's the most important step, the most important part of the process of mass formation.
A new kind of solidarity emerges and a new kind of social bond.
So people feel less, as you said, less isolated and less fragmented from then on.
But there is something strange about this new social bond and this new solidarity.
The new social bond, and that is extremely important, I've never explained that before, it's the first time now.
But the new social bond is never a social bond between individuals.
It's always a social bond between the individual and the collective.
And that's what's so typical, because totalitarian states, people often mix up totalitarian states and classical dictatorships, but they are completely different.
They are radically different at the psychological level.
And it is exactly because a totalitarian state is based on this process of mass formation.
And once the masses emerge, All people feel connected, not with each other, because mass formation usually destroys all bonds between the individuals, and that's what totalitarian states also do.
Sometimes intentionally, sometimes this happens spontaneously through the emergence of a very paranoid atmosphere, but sometimes it's also done intentionally.
For instance, in the Soviet Union, it was done intentionally.
In Nazi Germany, it emerged spontaneously.
But the point is that this new social bond is always a bond between the individual and the collective.
And it's actually the bond between the individual and the collective is the only one that is still allowed.
It's the only one that is still legal in a totalitarian state.
And that's extremely important.
You know, I just make an observation that the word fascism, the meaning of it, Safety for the stick is to be part of that bundle.
And the bundle becomes all important.
So the bonds between the sticks are meaningless.
The only relationship that is important is between the individual and the state, individual and the church, whatever institution it is that is seeking dominance.
And I also just remind people of what became a mantra very, very early in this pandemic.
On American TV, you heard it day after day, repeated almost like a Gregorian chant.
We're all in this together.
We are all in this together.
And it was like a summit, it was a hypnotic kind of, you know, seduction to tell us, yes, we are all part of something big now.
And part of that is we must obey to show that we're part of it.
Obedience is critical.
Yes, and also an important part of the message of the state is always, you should be prepared to sacrifice your individual interests for the sake of the collective.
That's what all mass formation demands, and that's also what all totalitarian states demand.
And that's something in a strange way that has always been observed historically and you can observe it now.
In a strange way, people are also willing to do so.
They are also willing to do so.
And you can perfectly actually, when people are atomized and when people feel for a long time socially isolated without meaningful connections, They actually crave to belong to a collective.
And part of the population usually, it's about 30% usually, who is really into this process of mass formation.
For this part of the population, all the measures, the corona measures, no matter how absurd they are, they will be experienced unconsciously usually.
As a kind of rituals.
And what is the characteristic of ritualistic behavior?
It's a kind of behavior that has no pragmatic meaning, that from a practical point of view is absurd, and that demands a sacrifice of the individual.
A sacrifice through which the individual shows that the collective is more important than the individual interest.
And that's why no matter how absurd the corona measures become, Even more, the more absurd they come, the more they will be applauded by a certain part of the population, exactly because it is part of the population that is in need of this ritual to connect again.
And that's also the reason, once you understand that, you understand that the real reason why people buy into the narrative usually is definitely not that they consider the narrative to be correct.
Or to be accurate from a scientific point of view, the real reason is that it leads to this new social bond, this new connectedness.
And once you understand that, you understand that, you will never be able to convince this 30% of the population who is into the process of mass formation by showing them that the narrative is not correct.
I believe we have to continue to show that it is not correct Because there is other groups as well.
There is this one group and there is a middle group who knows and feels that there is something wrong with the narrative, but that nevertheless will never go against the current or against the crowd.
So we definitely have to continue to show that there is a rational problem with it, but we should not expect that the people who are really into the process of mass formation or into this group hypnosis, when it's exactly the same as group hypnosis, all major scholars have described that, Gustav Lebon, Sigmund Freud, MacDougall, Carnetti, and so on, they all have concluded that mass formation.
Basically, it's identical to group formation, with one exception, I don't know, maybe we can go into this later on, with one exception that the hypnotist is also under hypnosis in the process of mass formation, which is not the same, which is not true in classical hypnosis.
Let me propose something that's obvious, but clearly there's some biological advantage in, historically, evolutionary advantage in that human tendency to subsume the individual into a group identity.
And I guess we also could call it tribalism.
During 20,000 generations, our ancestors were wandering the African savannah in tiny warring groups where we had to follow a strong male leader, where we had to figure out ways to bond ourselves to the other members of our group so that we would protect them,
that we would view people We needed to develop all kinds of mechanisms to reinforce unit cohesion.
And rituals, of course, are one of the ways that you do that.
Shared cosmologies, shared ideologies, everybody agreeing that this is, you know, the story, the narrative that we're all going to ascribe to and all agree with.
And the groups that were able to do that One way or the other succeeded in leaving more of their genetic material.
And we are the legates.
We are the inheritors of that material.
So we have those tendencies that make us vulnerable to the alchemies of demagoguery.
And demagoguery is just a way of where strong leaders or authoritarian elements can Can make that contact with the, you know, those parts of our brain, you know, that revert and retreat to tribalism, particularly in the presence of orchestrated fear.
No, indeed.
I believe that in order for a human being to live a life worthy of a human being, there needs to be a balance between the individual and the collective, I believe, because extreme individualism, Individuals need a collective.
They need to be connected.
They need to be prepared to sacrifice a certain part of their individual egoistic interests in sake of the collective.
But the other way around is also true that the collective needs to be there for the sake of the individual.
It needs to be there in function of the individual.
I believe that, yes, well...
Autoritarian leaders can easily abuse the vulnerability and sensitivity for the population, for anxiety, to organize, steer, manipulate the masses.
That's definitely true.
I think it's a very interesting question to ask what the nature of the leaders of the masses are and of the totalitarian leaders, which is actually more or less the same, what their nature is.
I do believe, as Gustave Le Bon said, That usually the leaders of the masses are also hypnotized.
They are hypnotized, he said, by their own ideology.
So they very strongly believe that their ideology is what is needed to create a kind of a new society and a new world.
In that, in one way or another, they fanatically believe in the value of their own ideology, and that's why they also believe that it is justified to create as much collateral damage as necessary to realize this ideal society.
But that's something very important, I believe, we have to differentiate between the ideology, the leaders of the masses usually blindly and fanatically believe in their ideology, but they usually believe Do not believe in the narratives they use to push and to steer the masses in the direction of their ideology.
To the contrary...
They usually think it's justified to lie, cheat and manipulate because they believe that in the end they are the only ones who...
You know, one of the, I mean, the question that must be foremost in your mind, and I think most of the people who are struggling with this bizarre new reality is, how do you wake people up from this hypothesis?
A lot of times studying this was Milton Erickson.
And what he said was that you can never wake somebody up out of mass hypnosis through direct confrontation.
That you need to begin by validating their beliefs, by validating their fear, by essentially forming a bond with them.
And then using the Socratic method, questioning, asking questions about the beliefs, In order to begin sowing doubt in their mind.
If doubt comes from outside, they become impenetrable.
Their fortifications become even more robust.
And so you have to figure out a way, one, to infiltrate by validating what their belief system is, and then beginning the process of sowing the seeds of doubt through questioning rather than Yes, indeed.
One of the problems in mass formation is that has always been described by all major scholars that as the mass formation emerges in society, the individuals become radically intolerant for dissonant voices.
And that's just logical because the mass formation makes people switch From this highly negative state of social isolation, lack of meaning-making, free-floating anxiety, to a symptomatic positive state of being highly connected in the collective, a new meaning-making emerges in life, the anxiety is coupled to a representation, and the frustration and aggression can be directed at the scapegoat.
So it makes people switch from the negative to the positive state, and the dissonant voices Threaten to wake people up and to confront them again with the initial negative state.
And also, so it's much, much easier for the masses to continue to believe in the narrative and to continue to use the dissonant voice as a scapegoat.
And that's actually what is happening.
And that makes it extremely difficult how to try to wake someone up, of course.
But, as you said, I think the Socratic method can be one strategy to deal with it, but also just, I think, continuing to speak what you believe is the truth in a sincere and honest way as possible, definitely, without, while being sensitive to the reactions of the other, I think, Gustave Le Bon said that this is of crucial importance.
He said Dissonant voices will usually not be able to wake up the masses, but they will make the hypnosis less deep or, formulated in another way, they will prevent the hypnosis to become so deep that the masses start to commit atrocities, because that's what they typically do, because they have all this potential of...
Free-floating frustration and aggression, they always seek, as you said yourself, a scapegoat.
So that's clearly, from a historical perspective, it is clear that, for instance, in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, the absurd atrocities of the system started exactly at that moment when the system succeeded in silencing the opposition in public space.
And that's also something that is radically at contrast with what happens in a classical dictatorship.
If a classical dictator succeeds in silencing the opposition in public space, his aggression will almost always mitigate.
It will become milder just because the dictator has enough common sense to understand that at that moment he should show that the people will benefit from his leadership.
But a totalitarian leader, because he is in this state of mental intoxication, in the hypnotic state, because he's so fanatically convinced of his utopian new world that he wants to create, at the moment he is in charge,
at the moment he silenced the opposition, at that moment He will really start to unleash all his devils and to start to commit his absurd atrocities that happened around 1930 in the Soviet Union and around 1935 in Nazi Germany.
And you see historically that these two things, the silencing of the opposition and the absurdness of the atrocities, happens at the same time.
And that's what we should learn from history.
It is an illusion to think that it will be safer To shut up and to stop speaking.
It is an illusion.
The better you understand it, the more you see that the only option we have is to continue to speak out and to connect with each other.
One thing that I deduce from my psychological analysis of the situation People who are bewildered by the ferocity and the violence of the reaction when they ask simple, common-sense questions about, for example, vaccines or masks or lockdowns.
Any kind of reasonable discourse, any congenial type of debate is impossible.
The reaction is almost when those Theology is questioned.
The reaction is violent, it's angry, it's ferocious, it's rageful, it's blaming, and you are treated as a dangerous, dangerous enemy.
People are baffled by that, but I think this explanation makes sense.
Yes, yes.
It's what we all experience every day, I guess, that in one way or another, The dissonant voice, yes, meets with a lot of resistance, yes, absolutely, yes.
But still, I also believe that there is, like, if we speak out, I think there is something else that is extremely important, that we should never try to convince people to go back to the old normal.
Because from a psychological point of view, that is absurd.
Because the old normal and the psychological misery, the social isolation and the anxiety and so on in the old normal was exactly the reason why people fell prey to mass formation.
So I believe that it makes much more sense if we speak out to try to make people aware of the fact that to escape the new normal There are more options to escape the old normal.
There are more options than a new normal which is transhumanist and technocratic, totalitarian in nature.
There are more options than to end up in a society where people are subjected to a social credit system.
We can conceive a new normal in which people can live a life worthy of a human being, a free life.
And I think that that idea, this representation of an alternative new normal, As an escape from the terrible old normal.
That, I believe, should be something that's central in every attempt to wake up the masses and to provide to speak out.
And I think we do this not enough now.
I also notice in myself that I always have the inclination to criticize what is happening now and to try to make it stop while I believe it would be much better To try to convince people, to show people that we have to move forward, but we have to be critical and to think about what the exact nature of the new normal is that we will move on to.
Do you consider it ironic at all, based upon your analysis, that the atomization, fragmentation, the isolation is directly linked to the use of these new technologies and the beneficiary,
the principal beneficiaries of financial and, you know, from a power perspective, of this rising, emerging totalitarianism The internet titans whose technology laid the groundwork for the social Yes,
yes.
I'm sure that the social disintegration and so on is to a large extent the consequence of technology.
That's also what I just finished a book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, and I described there what the The historical process is that led to totalitarianism and to mass formation.
And because people often forget that totalitarianism and totalitarian states were entirely new in the 20th century.
They did not exist before.
Nothing like that existed before.
And it is because, in one way or another, the industrialization and the technology, the use of technology, the use of mass media, led to this very typical social disintegration that we have been describing now.
So I'm sure that In the end, ultimately, totalitarianism, mass formation, is a consequence of technology and stuff, and even, ultimately, it's a consequence of...
Let me push back on that a little, because I would say that there's a very, very close analogy to the religious theocracies, and particularly in medieval Europe, and then in different times with all the majors.
At one point, we're operating theocratic states.
You have merger of government and religious leadership.
That was a very, very simpler, to me, form of totalitarianism, a control of every aspect of human behavior, from the financial system to, you know, sexual behavior.
Yes.
There are analogies with certain religious...
But I also think there are also differences.
It's strange.
For instance, religious societies have their rituals, but they are fully aware, and they can be terrible, of course.
It's not about which one is the best of the two.
But in the religious societies, people are aware that the rituals have a symbolic meaning.
And that's the problem.
We are facing now, I believe, that people actually constantly participate in ritualistic behavior, which is extremely self-destructive, but at the same time, they are not aware of it at all.
They believe that they are doing something that has a practical relevance, even a practical necessity.
So they are destroying themselves, being convinced that they do something that is good for themselves.
And that's also so typical for the state of hypnosis.
I want you to continue.
When you talk about rituals, you're talking about putting on masks, vaccinations.
All right, so continue what you were saying.
That are the new rituals, I believe.
And sometimes the experts also more or less say that.
Like in Belgium here, there were two or three virologists who admitted that mask wearing in the first place has a symbolic function.
That locking down restaurants and hotels in the first place had a symbolic function.
I believe they say so without really knowing what they tell.
But indeed, Like under hypnosis, if people are allergic to chemical anesthesia, sometimes doctors in a hospital use a hypnotic procedure and a relatively simple hypnotic procedure is sufficient to focus the attention of a patient so much on one aspect of reality, usually something positive, in order to To make the person, the patient, radically insensitive to pain.
I've ever seen that in the real world and it's really impressive how after a simple hypnotic procedure, the surgeon can start to cut through the skin, through the flesh, sometimes straight through the breastbone to perform an open heart operation.
And the patient, his attention is so focused that he even doesn't notice it.
That shows to what extent Something like hypnosis has the potential to make people forget about their individual interests and that's also exactly what happens when performing the rituals in a phenomenon of mass formation.
People become radically self-destructive and that's on the one hand also, on the other hand also the good news.
Hannah Arendt and also Gustave Le Bon both mentioned that in a cynical way totalitarianism It's not a real problem because it always destroys itself in the end.
And from a psychological point of view, you can perfectly explain why it is self-destructive.
But in any case, I believe that in religious societies, you won't find the same radically self-destructive dynamics, I believe.
And again, that doesn't mean that we should move back.
To institutionalized religion as the guiding principle of society.
But I do believe there are differences, yes.
Okay, so let me ask you the final question.
When is it all going to end?
Because, you know, I mean, the thing that worries me is that throughout history, totalitarianism, Global control of every aspect of behavior.
They've never been able to achieve it.
And there was ways to challenge it.
But now with all this technology, track and trace surveillance and the data gathering, you know, the facial recognition, And the vaccine passports,
they have all of these instrumentalities of control that may conceivably could sustain even the most oppressive kind of regime, even in the face of the most powerful popular resistance for years, decades, or whenever.
I don't believe it will sustain, and I even don't believe it will last very long, which doesn't take away.
I do believe it will last several years.
I do believe that.
But the advantage is, or the advantage is in a more or less cynical way, is that no matter what means, The totalitarian state or the masses have at their disposal, in the end, they cannot avoid always turning them against themselves.
So it could even be that exactly because there are more means now at the disposal of the totalitarian state, that the process goes much faster and that the self-destruction occurs much quicker.
And also, for the first time in history, we are confronted with a totalitarian system who has no external enemy.
Which is an extremely important difference.
So I believe we really have to keep in mind that we have to continue to connect, we have to continue to speak out, we have to demonstrate and usually We have to demonstrate and to speak out according to the principles of non-violent resistance.
That is also something that is also has been remarked time and time again by the people who studied the masses, that violence very often usually works counterproductive because it justifies the masses to commit their atrocities.
But if You stick in a firm and in a convinced way to the principles of nonviolent resistance, then the most astonishing results might happen.
You know, in a classical dictatorship, nonviolent resistance is absurd.
It's absurd because what you're dealing with is with someone who uses his aggressive potential in a conscious and lucid way.
But for one reason or another, in imperialism and totalitarianism, Nonviolent resistance works very well.
So I believe if we understand what has been happening throughout the last century and we connect and we understand that we have to continue to speak out, I believe we will be able to create enough parallel structure to continue to exist outside of the system and to wait until the system weakens, possibly even completely destroys itself.
That's the strategy, which is not only a strategy, I think, but which is also, from an ethical perspective, the way we should go.
That's my two-cent word opinion.
Dr.
Matthias Desmond, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you very much for inviting me, Robert.
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